MicroStrategy Analytics Platform Certified on Apache Spark

TYSONS CORNER, Va., June 4 — MicroStrategy Incorporated, a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms, today announced the certification of the MicroStrategy Analytics Platform on Apache Spark, the in-memory processing engine that is now a part of all major Hadoop distributions, at the sixth annual Hadoop Summit in San Jose, CA. The integration will leverage the power of the MicroStrategy Analytics Platform to run analytics against Hadoop and Big Data stores.

In addition, MicroStrategy is collaborating with Databricks, founded by the creators of Apache Spark, to deepen its integration with Apache Spark. As part of the collaboration, MicroStrategy is focused on leveraging upcoming innovations, such as SparkSQL in Spark 1.0, and enabling enterprise users to seamlessly access advanced analytics functionality in Spark. Large global organizations, including Yahoo! Taiwan, are already using the combination of MicroStrategy and Spark in testing and development environments.

“While Hadoop and other Big Data stores are valuable strategic assets to organizations due to the richness of the data they maintain, the challenge organizations face today is effectively monetizing those assets through wider access,” said Paul Zolfaghari, President, MicroStrategy Incorporated. “We firmly believe in the transformational power of Big Data platforms and are excited to be working with Databricks and Spark to deliver tremendous advantages to MicroStrategy customers, due to the ‘push down’ nature of interactive Big Data analytics — effectively bringing the analytics to the data, as opposed to the reverse.”

Spark has seen rapid adoption by the developer community (it is the most active open source Big Data project in the past 12 months) as well as enterprises, as it is now a part of all major Hadoop distributions. Beyond the speed benefits from its in-memory optimized architecture that can deliver 100x performance improvement, Spark provides a unified platform for analytics processing, with interactive queries, streaming data support, machine learning, and graph computation all available. Additionally, beyond processing Hadoop data ‘in-place,’ Spark provides native support for other data stores, such as NoSQL and RDBMS systems.

“At Databricks, our focus is on continually innovating and driving the adoption of Spark as broadly and widely as possible,” said Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji, head of business development, Databricks. “As with any platform, a vibrant application ecosystem is critical to this goal, and best-in-class analytics tools continue to be a widely adopted medium for consuming Big Data. Spark running under MicroStrategy puts a scalable next-generation analytics engine with blazing fast and sophisticated analytics alongside enterprise-grade visualization, reporting and dashboards — all with an eye to strong data governance.”